Unraveling the Narrative

A scholar raises questions, and hackles, with evidence that the ex-slave who wrote the definitive first-person account of the Middle Passage may not have made that infamous journey

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Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live discussion with Vincent Carretta, a professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, about evidence that Olaudah Equiano's famous first-person account of the Middle Passage is fictional.

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By JENNIFER HOWARD

What if you were told that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark never made it past St. Louis in 1803? And that Lewis's famous diary of the Louisiana Purchase expedition was an embroidery of reports from trappers and American Indians?

Imagine that, and you begin to understand why some people are upset with Vincent Carretta, a professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Mr. Carretta has uncovered evidence that an equally important text in American and British Atlantic history -- a description of the Middle Passage written by an ex-slave, Olaudah Equiano -- might not be a firsthand account of the harrowing journey endured by slaves transported across the ocean.

Equiano's account of the Middle Passage in his 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, is considered definitive. "The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate," he wrote, "added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. ... The wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable. ... The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable."

Equiano says he was born in 1745 in "a charming fruitful vale, named Essaka," in an Igbo-speaking region on the west coast of Africa in what is now southeastern Nigeria. But in a forthcoming biography of Equiano, Mr. Carretta presents evidence he found in public records that Equiano was born in South Carolina.

Mr. Carretta's conclusions threaten a pillar of scholarship on slave narratives and the African diaspora. Questioning Equiano's origins calls into doubt some fundamental assumptions made in departments of African-American studies and among historians and literary critics who study the British Atlantic world. Scholars have also relied on Equiano for his account of 18th-century life in West Africa.

Mr. Carretta's findings have not won him friends in certain circles.

"I've gotten quite negative reactions from some people in African-American studies, and some very negative reactions from Nigerians, particularly Igbos," he says. "He's a national hero, particularly in Igboland, what would have become Biafra."

Paul E. Lovejoy, a professor of history and director of the Harriet Tubman Resource Center on the African Diaspora, at York University, in Toronto, says Equiano's birthplace is "the most important thing. Everything about the authenticity of everything he says about kidnapping and the Middle Passage" hangs on his African origins.

But Mr. Carretta's painstaking documentation has convinced some scholars that he is right.

"He is a sleuth of the highest order," Philip D. Morgan, a professor of history at Princeton University and the author of Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), says in an e-mail message. "He has discovered more information about Equiano than I would ever have imagined possible. He has raised fundamental questions about Equiano's birthplace. ... This is a stunning turnabout, I will confess."

Passing Muster

Mr. Carretta did not set out to undermine Equiano's credibility. He first encountered The Interesting Narrative in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s edition of Four Classic Slave Narratives, and decided to add it to courses he taught on 18th-century British literature, in which black voices were few and far between.

The book itself is a swashbuckling tale that takes its hero from an idyllic boyhood in Africa through the travails of slavery and a series of maritime adventures to spiritual, legal, and economic rebirth as a free man in England in the last decades of the 18th century. An immediate best seller in Britain, The Interesting Narrative had nine editions in its author's lifetime.

"It's an adventure story, it's an economic treatise, it's a slave narrative, a captivity narrative," says Mr. Carretta. "It's maybe historical fiction. It's history, it's a history of slavery." He remains convinced of the book's literary and historical significance: "Part of the definition of a classic is that it can be approached at different times in different ways."

His doubts about Equiano's origins began only when he undertook a labor of love: a new Penguin edition of The Interesting Narrative.

Mr. Carretta combed British records for traces of Equiano or Vassa, which was the name given him as a slave. "No one who had written on Equiano or cited him, even those who had reproduced versions of his text, had ever bothered to check. And I, having a mind of concrete, said, 'He gives me a date, he gives me a place, he gives me a name, it should be verifiable.'"

What the Maryland professor unearthed among public British documents -- including a 1759 parish baptismal record and a 1773 ship's muster, both of which list Equiano's place of birth as South Carolina -- came as a shock. "I was surprised. I was resistant, in fact," Mr. Carretta says. "The naval record was the real problem to me, because at that point he's free, he's an adult. The pursers went and simply asked, 'What's your name? Where are you from?'"

Mr. Carretta's discoveries first appeared, in 1995, as notes in the Penguin edition. "I was quasi-cowardly," he recalls. "I think of what I first did as a depth charge because it was submerged in footnotes. I wanted to see what people would make of it. No one noticed."

Only when he published an article challenging Equiano's birth in Africa in the journal Slavery and Abolition in 1999 did people react. "That's when it really hit the fan," he says.

Literary critics do not usually publish in history journals, but the decision made sense to Mr. Carretta. "My methodology needed to be accepted by the historians in order to have any credibility long term," he says. "If you publish in a history journal, it will get to the literary folks. It'll take a little bit of time, but it'll get to them."

Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), credits Mr. Carretta with being "extremely careful in his research. I think he's right to say you have to note these two points where, when asked, Equiano gave something other than an African birthplace."

In his forthcoming book, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (University of Georgia Press, October), Mr. Carretta lays out his controversial evidence as part of a detailed examination of Equiano's successive identities. Though the professor offers a caveat that absolute proof of Equiano's origins might never be found, his argument has already persuaded some.

"As he says, we will probably never know the definitive truth," says Mr. Morgan, "but I am now more inclined to believe that Equiano was probably born in Carolina rather than in Igboland."

Origins of a Dispute

Mr. Carretta's findings have been widely discussed among historians and literary scholars, says York's Mr. Lovejoy. "A lot of people are buying into the two documents that Carretta has discovered."

In the six years since the Slavery and Abolition article appeared, no one has offered a serious rebuttal in print. But that does not mean that everyone agrees with its conclusions.

Mr. Hochschild and Mr. Lovejoy continue to believe that Equiano was African-born. "The thing that doesn't fit is the document that says he was born in South Carolina," Mr. Lovejoy says. "Everything else fits. The one thing that's odd -- that's the one that has to be questioned, not the other way around."

He will soon publish his own article in Slavery and Abolition, in which he attempts to explain the discrepancies between the documentary record and The Interesting Narrative. Of the baptismal record, for instance, Mr. Lovejoy says: "My own suspicion ... is that his godmother put down Carolina because she didn't think anyone would believe this guy who spoke English so well was actually born in Africa." (He also plans to write his own biography of Equiano.)

As one of the earliest blow-by-blow accounts of African enslavement told in the victim's voice, The Interesting Narrative played a key role in the debate over ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which was legally abolished in Britain in 1807. But Mr. Carretta's detective work also calls into question the book's use as a crucial source on the Africa of Equiano's time.

"He's always been taken as the central source of information about the 18th-century Igbo," says Mr. Carretta. "Part of that is because he's basically unique. Now there's a problem with a unique source. We need some external way to check this."

Mr. Morgan concurs: "Specialists relied on his account of that region's hinterland precisely because it was about the only one they have."

Equiano's account describes a happy childhood in a region "uncommonly rich and fruitful," and his countrymen as "almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets." While slavery's advocates painted Africa as a benighted, heathen land of savages, Equiano suggested that Africans were more civilized than Western Europeans.

"It works as a kind of founding myth, if you wish, for African-American history," says Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emerita of American history at Princeton University. She directed the university's program in African-American studies from 1997 to 2000, and is the author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (W.W. Norton, 1996).

"Equiano's narrative works as a depiction of an almost Edenic Africa, a small-scale community in which people knew each other and worked hard," Ms. Painter says. From him we learn "what African-Americans and other Americans need to know about the slave trade and the areas that produced the ancestors that produced some African-Americans."

At Sea With Equiano

In The Interesting Narrative, Equiano gives a dramatic account of his kidnapping at the age of 11 by Africans and his eventual delivery into the hands of white slave traders, who forcibly conveyed him to the West Indies. When no one bought him there, Equiano was taken to Virginia and sold to a British Navy lieutenant, Michael Henry Pascal.

From that point on, Equiano's account generally squares with Mr. Carretta's research. In Pascal's service, he sailed the seas, qualified as an able seaman, and saw action during the Seven Years' War. Near the end of that war, in 1763, Equiano expected Pascal to free him; instead the lieutenant sold him into bondage back in the West Indies, where the slave used his entrepreneurial skills to amass enough money to buy his freedom in 1766.

As a free man, he chose London as his home, but continued to sail the Atlantic, even as far as the Arctic. In 1773 Equiano signed on to an expedition aboard HMS Racehorse, whose muster list Mr. Carretta unearthed. The ship failed to achieve its objective of finding a northwest passage, but Equiano soon experienced a spiritual passage of his own: In 1774 the nominal Christian had a born-again experience that looms large in The Interesting Narrative. In 1775-76 he describes helping a former employer, Dr. Charles Irving, attempt to establish a slave-run plantation venture in Central America.

Even in that episode, however, Equiano's story may be more -- or less -- than it seems. Mr. Lovejoy is convinced that Equiano agreed to buy and oversee Igbo slaves as part of what he thought was a plan to let them work for their freedom. Where the ex-slave's narrative "shouldn't be doubted, it is," he says. "And where it should be doubted, no one's looking, as far as I can tell."

Was Equiano's Central American scheme truly an abolitionist venture? After all, he did emerge as one of the strongest public voices in the abolitionist cause. Mr. Carretta notes that in The Interesting Narrative, Equiano "undergoes two conversions. One is to Christianity, and one is to an antislave-trade, antislavery position -- because for most of his life he accepts slavery as a given, as did 99 percent of the people, black and white."

In 1792 Equiano married a white Englishwoman, and they had two daughters. He more or less self-published his autobiography, retaining the copyright -- a risky and unusual move in those days, when most books didn't make it into a second edition -- and putting together a list of well-connected and influential subscribers who agreed to buy copies.

"He was a networker par excellence," says Mr. Carretta. "People call him a black Benjamin Franklin. He published his autobiography before Benjamin Franklin's was published, so we should start calling Franklin a white Equiano. You can't be any more self-made than someone who starts as a piece of property."

Canon Fire

The success of The Interesting Narrative made Equiano a wealthy man, with a considerable estate to bequeath to the daughter who survived him when he died, in 1797. But after the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, public interest in his tale waned, and no new editions of the book appeared after the 1820s or so. Mr. Carretta does believe that Frederick Douglass may have seen it before he published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, in 1845.

It was only in the 1980s that Equiano was really rediscovered. Indeed, Ms. Painter recalls that his narrative was not in print when she was in graduate school in the 1970s.

Ms. Painter places the relatively recent resurrection of Equiano in perspective as part of a larger movement within African-American studies: "Equiano arose as an African-American forefather with the diasporic turn in African-American history in the 1980s and 1990s," she says. "He appeared in the 1980s as an emblem of the diasporic -- or international -- nature of African-American identity. ... The international dimension came to the fore in the wake of the Black Power era, in which black Americans appeared as colonized people in the context of decolonization and independence in the Third World."

By the time Mr. Carretta undertook the Penguin edition, in the 1990s, The Interesting Narrative had achieved canonical status. Equiano's trans-Atlantic, transnational experience made him very appealing to scholars increasingly concerned with questions of colonial and postcolonial identity. He fit well into the sociologist Paul Gilroy's idea of the Black Atlantic, put forth in Gilroy's influential The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993). (In a review for The Nation, Eric Lott wrote that that book "uses the transnational concept of the diaspora to explore the migrations, discontinuities, fractal patterns of exchange and hybrid glory that join the black cultures of America, Britain, and the Caribbean to one another and to Africa. Gilroy isn't the first to chart the Black Atlantic, but he is the first to situate it.")

Apart from failed attempts by some pro-slavery writers in the 18th century to attack Equiano's claim of African origins, his tale went unchallenged until 1982, when a Nigerian scholar, S.E. Ogude of the University of Benin, published an article in the journal Research in African Literatures with the title "Facts Into Fiction: Equiano's Narrative Reconsidered."

Mr. Ogude apparently based his qualms about Equiano on a reading of the text itself. Thirteen years later Mr. Carretta arrived at his own doubts via the historical records. But in March 2003, both researchers and a number of other Equiano scholars attended a conference at Kingston University, in London, titled "Olaudah Equiano: Representation and Reality." Organized by a senior lecturer in English at Kingston, the conference invited participants to debate the idea "that Equiano probably never visited Africa, and that the early parts of his Narrative are most likely rhetorical exercises."

In a report on the conference published in the journal Early American Literature, Mark Stein, of the University of Potsdam, in Germany, reported that Mr. Ogude "seems to have changed his view" on Equiano's veracity, concluding that he was "truly an Igbo man" after all. (The Chronicle was unable to reach Mr. Ogude for comment.)

Mr. Stein also reported that another scholar, Obiwu Iwuanyanwu, of Central State University, in Ohio, "went as far as accusing those who examine Equiano's African birth of professing 'anti-Equiano scholarship' with the potential to jeopardize the 'enduring human truth' of Equiano's text."

Mr. Carretta has tried to stay clear of any whiff of identity politics in the debate. "It would be disastrous for me to get into," he says. "Identity politics as we use it in academia to me is ... a dead end. Judge what I do by what I do, not by who I am or who you think I am. I've heard that people speculated about what sinister motives I have. I'm just trying to get the story straight."

Questioning Sources

If Mr. Carretta is right, why would Equiano have felt the need to fictionalize or fabricate a key portion of his experience? Where could he have found descriptions of African life and the deadly Middle Passage from which to borrow?

Equiano published his autobiography "just as the momentum is really building against the slave trade," Mr. Carretta says, "just after people have been calling for a black voice, a victim's voice. Whether [Equiano] invented his African birth or not, he knew that what that movement needed was a first-person account. And because they were going after the slave trade, it had to be an account of someone who had been born in Africa and was brought across the Middle Passage. An African-American voice wouldn't have done it."

As for the details, Equiano would have had access to the existing accounts of contemporary authors including the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and Anthony Benezet, a Philadelphia Quaker who collected accounts of Africa and the slave trade in books such as Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771). Equiano already cites some secondary sources in The Interesting Narrative to bolster "the imperfect sketch my memory has furnished me with" -- perhaps a natural disclaimer for a witness who would have been very young when taken from his homeland.

Mr. Morgan, of Princeton, suggests that Equiano may have drawn upon collective memory and oral history: "I am inclined to believe that, if he wasn't an Igbo himself, he knew some rather well and learned much from them. That fact indeed may explain why some of his reflections about Igboland seem to ring true."

Mr. Carretta says the text of The Interesting Narrative itself reinforces his doubts. "The first three chapters ... read like anthropology," he says. "Good anthropology, but anthropology. The subsequent chapters read like autobiography. I always ask my students, 'Do you hear the same voice throughout? In every class, a substantial number of them say, 'Sounds different after the Africa section.'"

Mr. Lovejoy, of York, dismisses the idea that Equiano would have had anything other than direct experience of the details included in The Interesting Narrative. And he disagrees with Mr. Carretta's idea that Equiano, whom he believes to have been fluent in Igbo, could have learned that language in South Carolina. "If he'd been lying, he'd been lying for a long time," he says. "And so all these other people, including all of the major, major white abolition leaders, all of them were fooled? It just doesn't make sense."

In the 18th century, "the demarcations we today make between fiction and nonfiction, between the autobiography (which had not really been invented back then) and the novel were far more fluid, far more porous," Mr. Morgan observes. "This context may help explain why Equiano used his imagination more than we might have thought. Indeed, we know his imagination was luminous, because his rhetorical strategies, his self-promotion, his self-representation were masterful."

Although Mr. Hochschild gave Equiano, the African a prepublication endorsement, he argues that The Interesting Narrative does not read like fiction. "There is a long and fascinating history of autobiographies that distort or exaggerate the truth," he writes in an appendix to Bury the Chains. "But in each of these cases, the lies and inventions pervade the entire book." That is not the case with Equiano, he says.

What is not in doubt is Equiano's status as a significant literary and historical figure. As Mr. Hochschild puts it in his book, "Whatever the mystery of his origins, the bulk of Equiano's book, from his teenage years on, is undeniably authentic, and remains one of the great survivor's tales of his or any other time."

Mr. Carretta would like to put the focus back on Equiano's rhetorical and literary achievement. "Are we wasting time and energy arguing about the authenticity of Africanness instead of what he may have meant by African?" Mr. Carretta says. To him, the more interesting question is "In what way is he 'the African,' as he calls himself -- the representative of millions of others who have been enslaved?"

Whatever his origins, Equiano certainly remains one of Mr. Carretta's heroes.

"The more I discover about him," the professor says, "the more highly I think of him."